Keywords are on the way out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No, I\u2019m not saying search engine optimization (SEO) is no longer relevant. As long as search engines exist, SEO must remain a fixture in your brand\u2019s digital marketing strategy. What I am <\/em>saying is that the relevance of single-word search terms is fading fast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n There are multiple reasons for this change, but they all ultimately trace back to one thing. Today\u2019s search engines are more concerned with determining a user\u2019s intent<\/em> than they are about exact-match keywords. They want to serve relevant content <\/em>that people want to find rather than simply belching out whichever pages have the best technical SEO. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That level of relevance is extremely difficult to maintain if you\u2019re still focused on single-serving keywords. Individual words generally don\u2019t give any clues as to a user\u2019s intent. They lack the necessary context from both a content creation and an SEO perspective. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Long-tail keywords or key phrases, on the other hand, provide a great starting point. For example, let\u2019s look at the keyword \u201cmicrowave.\u201d Someone who types in a phrase including that word could be looking for a wide range of things: <\/p>\n\n\n\n You get the idea. Context is everything<\/em>, and individual keywords don\u2019t offer context. That isn\u2019t the only reason key phrases and topics have become so prominent, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As digital assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home become more popular, so too is conversational search. It\u2019s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. As defined by Techpedia<\/a>: <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe principle behind conversational search is that a user can speak a sentence into a device, and that device can respond with a full sentence. This principle is also applied to searches: where traditional searches mostly analyzed individual keywords, a conversational search looks at the whole string of words, to return human-like responses.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n At this point, we\u2019ve hammered home that individual keywords should no longer be your focus. That means you should target long-tail keywords and key-phrases, right? Sort of – they come with their own problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n